ART: IN BLECKNER SHOW, AN ARRAY OF PAST MOTIFS

Published: February 13, 1987

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In these works and others titled ''Head'' and ''Brains,'' Dwyer seems to build upon elements familiar from the work of Richard Artshwager and Ed Ruscha. This slight indebtedness suggests that these may be transitional works, but they are among her best. (Through Feb. 28.) Keith Haring (Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 163 Mercer Street, at Houston Street): Keith Haring's exhibition also shows us an artist in transition, but painfully so. Haring's achievement is considerable, but it also rests largely outside art, even by today's hybridized standards. Like Peter Max, Mr. Haring is one of the best designer-illustrators of his generation. His distinctive drawing style and the apocalyptic comic-book world of crawling babies, barking dogs and interlocking bodies that he has created, have turned up on everything from buttons and sweatshirts to, most recently, vodka advertisements.

As his exhibition at Leo Castelli last year and parts of this one prove, Haring's figures also translate well into large-scale, brightly colored steel sculpture that suggests effective use in playgrounds or public parks. But the sculpture is secondary in this show, which is dominated by a series of painted metal masks displayed on the wall and a large group of canvases.

The masks, which take cues from African tribal art as well as Picasso and are painted in acid contemporary colors, perpetuate Mr. Haring's cheerful, confident, graphic style, this time used as a form of decorative scarification. The new paintings are considerably less confident, but are not without a certain courage. They show Mr. Haring refusing to rely on any of his old standbys, and searching for a new kind of mark, a different, more painterly, drawing style. Many possibilities are considered, but the artist fails to come up with a convincing alternative. Still, it is rather amazing to see him try so hard, so publicly. (Through Feb. 21.) Peggy Cyphers (Ground Zero, 240 East Ninth Street): In most of Peggy Cyphers' new two-panel paintings, an animated spiral and an equally animated Chevron shape, both more organic than geometric, cavort in an ambiguous, semi-abstract landscape. Their antics, painted in oil on canvas, are recapitulated below on smaller pradella-like panels made of rough white-sprayed tarpaper. The contrast between these two surfaces and the scenes they depict - one creamy and in focus, the other rough and out-of-focus, one suggesting a vital, breathing ''real'' world, the other its subterranean fossilized remains - is the focal point of the work.

The problem is that the tarpaper pradellas are considerably more engaging than their canvas counterparts. Without this unconventional surface to work on, it becomes clear that Cyphers' brushwork is still rather ordinary and occasionally slack. Only in ''Origin of the Species,'' one of the show's smallest paintings, does the canvas image hold its own against the tarpaper one. The qualities that distinguish this canvas from the others are subtle, but they make a world of difference. (Through Sunday.)